Background: Microsoft against free competition

In 2001 the European Union, through the DG Competition of the
European Commission (lead by prof. Monti), started investigating on
Microsoft dominant position in the desktop operating systems. The
Free Software Foundation Europe was invited from the EC to represent
the stances of Free Software movement. In 2004 FSFE is trying to
participate to the appeal to defend again free competition and freedom
of choice against abuses.

FSFE decided to contribute to the investigations of DG
Competition due to our long and broad experience in the software
field. Also Free Software, and in particular the GNU/Linux operating
system, was cited by Microsoft as its principal competitor, therefore
FSFE had a direct interest in defending it. In a letter to the DG Competition dated 16
November 2001, FSFE asked to be heard.

The request was accepted and therefore the team members and lawyers
of FSFE had access to the confidential information and had the
chance to comment on the advancement of the investigation.

In August 2003, FSFE asked the Commission to hear the
suggestions of the Samba Team to bring back competition in the
file/print server market. The document, signed by
Jeremy Allison, project leader of Free Software Project Samba, was
very well received. In a private hearing in November 2003, Peter
Gerwinski and Jeremy Allison exposed the positions of FSFE and of the Samba Team officially
in front of the Commission.

The Final Decision of the DG
Competition takes into consideration most of the comments made by FSF
Europe to defend Free Software (although it is not a perfect
solution.)

In June 2004 Microsoft appealed against the sentence. FSFE
is worried that the loopholes in the Decision can be exploited by
Microsoft's lawyers and is therefore participating to the appeal.

The Decision of the DG Competition contains unclear statements,
most of them caused by the abuse of the unclear word "Intellectual
Property". The ambiguity of such word makes it difficult to judge if
the Commission is asking Microsoft to give up copyright on parts of
their source code or license to everybody its patents on the protocols
and interfaces they have developed or even give up some valuable
"trade secrets". An even bigger problem with the
Decision is that it allows Microsoft to use so-called "RAND"
(Reasonable And Not Discriminatory) licenses. As repeated often, the
RAND clauses for using patented interfaces or protocols actually
discriminate against Free Software implementations since, however cheap those
licenses can be, they add a limit to the free distribution of software
(making it non-free).

In the end, FSFE believes that Microsoft should reveal all
information necessary to achieve complete inter-operation with its
systems, be it the Media Player or the Directory Service. To achieve
this it is not necessary to disclose source code developed by
Microsoft, it is not necessary to reveal "trade secrets" as protocols
and interfaces are already 'public' (since they can be reverse
engineered) but it is inconvenient to use them. It is extremely
important that the DG Competition guards the market and also avoids
that software patents are legalised in Europe, so that Free Software
implementations of those interfaces will always be possible.

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